Conventional document comparison programs, such as Workshare™ Professional or Deltaview, SoftInterface® Diff Doc™, DocsCorp compareDocs, and Esquire Innovations iRedline, compare differences between two documents (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, presentation documents, etc.), a task formerly reserved solely for humans. These programs identify and ascertain differences from the entirety of an original (first) and modified (second) document and display those differences in a third document, commonly referred to as a redline document.
These conventional document comparison programs fail to offer the ability to compare text from within the same document (such as an email), to compare text from different types of documents (such as a word document and a power point presentation), or to compare the text of two web pages or two email messages. Rather, when using the conventional programs, a reader must perform the cumbersome steps of selecting and copying the text from the source file, pasting the selected text into a new document, and repeating the copying and pasting for the second source so that the conventional program can then run the comparison process. This method is inefficient, burdensome, and a potential source of errors.